Introduction: This article is directed at introducing several key features of the Altiris Deployment Solution for Servers.
For those of you that have never used the product and thinking about adding this type of automation to your env. or those who are just getting started with it and wish to understand what it can really do for them in the real world.
My background using the DS for Servers is primarily managing, upgrading and provisioning Servers in the HealthCare industry, supporting large scale software deployments and upgrades for Epic’s HyperSpace on Citrix XenServer 4.0. We have moved away from using Citrix Installation Manager entirely to support software deployment and upgrades, and now depend on the Altiris Deployment Solution for Servers for all of our installation needs. Just as we have moved away from Ghost imaging and now use Altiris RDeploy.
We use DS for Servers to provision all of our Citrix Servers, what does this really mean to provision. It means we use the built in features of DS to capture Server images and deploy Server images using the Rdeploy imaging feature. If you don’t know what Rdeploy is, you can compare it to other imaging technologies like Symantic’s Ghost. Note: Symantec now owns Altiris and acquired them in May of 2007.
Server Provisioning With Altiris:
With Altiris deployment Solution for Servers you can automate deployment of new servers, either automating the entire OS install build process or use Rdeploy to deploy an already built server image to a Server. Either method you choose will require some upfront preparation and engineering for a completely automated drag and drop server build.
For me, I prefer building a master image installing Citrix on it and the applications, such as in our case Epic HyperSpace Spring 2007 IU1, then capturing a syspreped image of the server. And deploy it to a Server for regression testing. Once it is thoroughly regression tested, it will then be deployed to new or existing Dell Blade Servers. An example of this was we recently migrated from our Epic Silo from 2003 Server Standard Edition to 2003 Enterprise Edition for support of additional memory using the PAE switch. We followed the method outlined above and it was smooth, fast and very automated.
The components of automating Server builds with Deployment Solution for Servers
PXE Services (Pre-Execution Environment): Altiris Deployment Solution comes with PXE services, what is PXE Services, Most if not all newer class servers support PXE boot, booting to the network, independent of the local disk boot. For Dell Server Models, it’s F12 during boot that will allow you to boot in PXE mode, Which is a pointer to a DHCP Server that first issues an IP Address then starts an OS like DOS, or WinPE or Linix from the PXE Server. I choose to use WinPE for all of our server deployments. Since it provides fast image deployment times and supports a wide range of hardware.
Pre-Execution Env: The purpose of the PXE env like WinPE, is to run your imaging software to capture or deploy an image using any imaging solution you support, like Ghost, or you can use the Deployment Servers built in imaging services named Rdeploy. As discussed above, once the Server has PXE booted to the network and loads the WinPE from the deployment Server, it then launches Rdeploy.exe. or RDeployT.exe for DOS.
Note: Servers can be configured in the BIOS to automatically boot PXE first before trying to boot locally. The Deployment Server has features that integrate well with this situation and will detect if there is an imaging job waiting and will proceed to PXE boot, and if there is no imaging job waiting it will proceed to boot to the local disk.
Note 2: WinPE comes with the Deployment Server and is configured with many drivers to automatically detect hardware for the particular server brand you are imaging, such as the Network Card etc… You can add specific hardware drivers if you wish to support hardware models that are not common. I have discovered that updating the Network Card drivers for Intel and Broadcom in the WinPE configuration on the Deployment Server provides faster imaging times. Keep in mind you may need to update the Servers Firmware to keep up with the WinPE NIC drivers.
Rdeploy and RDeployT: As mentioned above, Rdeploy.exe will only run in WinPE and the RDeployT.exe will only run in DOS PXE boot modes. What I have discovered is that the DOS PXE mode boots much faster than WinPE, but imaging times are much slower, usually 15 minutes or more. Where as the WinPE boots slower, about 1 to 2 minutes, but imaging times are much faster, usually 40 seconds to 5 minutes for a 2 gig image.
Automating Post build configurations:
After an image job is completed, another words deploying an image to a server, it will automatically reboot. When the Windows OS starts you still need to configure the server with an IP Address, subnet mask, gateway, dns servers, wins and search suffix. You also need to name the server and join it to your Active Directory domain. These things can all be automated with the Altiris Deployment Solution for Servers. There are a couple of ways to automate the naming of the server and joining to your domain, as well as configuring it with static IP settings. Automating these tasks will take some time pre-engineering which method you are going to use. For instance, you can use sysprep to name the computer and join it to the domain by pre configuring the sysprep.inf file to perform these tasks, or you can create scripts that will run as jobs from the Deployment Server that will execute locally on the server after image is deployed to configure the network settings and join the domain, and perform other tasks, such as prepare the server for joining a Citrix Farm and installing software, etc…
Technical Note: If your standard is Network Card Teaming, it is possible to Automate the Network Card Teaming creation using a tool from HP or Dell. Both companies have written a small compiled program to automatically create the team, and it works with both Intel and Broadcom NIC’s.
Next Week
Part 2: Software Deployment and upgrades with Altiris Deployment Solution for Servers:
Written By Scott Chiara
